Palmyra: The Desert Queen Who Defied Rome
Palmyra occupied a position in the Syrian desert that geography had made irreplaceable and that commerce had made extraordinarily wealthy. An oasis city sitting at the crossing of the major caravan routes between the Mediterranean coast and Mesopotamia — between the Roman west and the Parthian and Sassanid east — it controlled the tolls and services that long-distance trade required and accumulated wealth that its extraordinary ruins still convey despite two millennia of decay and, most recently, deliberate destruction by forces who understood, in their way, the symbolic weight of what they were attacking.
The city’s Roman relationship began seriously in the first century AD. Formally incorporated into the province of Syria, Palmyra maintained a degree of autonomy through its commercial significance — the Romans needed the caravan trade and the Palmyrene merchant families who organized it — and developed a distinctive culture that blended Greek, Roman, Aramaean, and Parthian elements without being reducible to any of them. The Palmyrene ruling class was bilingual in Greek and Aramaean, used both Roman and Parthian stylistic elements in their art and architecture, and navigated between the two great empires of their era with the diplomatic sophistication that their geographical position required. The funerary towers visible in the valley of the tombs outside the city are neither Roman nor Parthian; they are Palmyrene, a distinctive local response to the universal human need to mark the dead that drew on multiple traditions to produce something new.
The city’s apogee came in the third century AD, during the Crisis of the Third Century, when the Roman Empire’s political and military collapse created opportunities for regional powers that the preceding period of relative Roman stability had not offered. Odaenathus, Palmyra’s ruler in the 260s AD, filled the military vacuum left by the capture of the Emperor Valerian by Shapur I of Persia, organizing a Palmyrene force that pushed back the Persian advance in ways that the Roman legions had been unable to manage. He was murdered in 267 or 268 AD under circumstances that remain obscure, and power passed to his wife Zenobia, who served as regent for their young son.
Zenobia’s subsequent career is one of the more remarkable episodes in late Roman history. Over the following years she expanded Palmyrene control beyond the city’s traditional sphere of influence, annexing Egypt — the empire’s most important province economically — in 270 AD, followed by much of the Levant and Anatolia. At the height of her expansion, Zenobia’s authority extended over territories that rivaled the empire’s eastern provinces in extent and exceeded them in commercial significance. She styled herself Queen of the East and Augustus, imperial titles whose use by a provincial ruler constituted an implicit claim to sovereign authority that the empire could not accept without admitting it had been superceded.
The ancient sources describe Zenobia in terms that reflect both genuine admiration and the discomfort of male writers confronted with a woman exercising military and political command at imperial scale. She was reportedly beautiful, highly educated — fluent in Aramaic, Greek, and Egyptian, with some Latin — politically astute, and militarily capable. She conducted campaigns in the field, hunted on foot rather than from a carriage, and reportedly drank her male advisors under the table when the occasion required it. The sources that describe her as the equal of the great queens of antiquity — Cleopatra and Dido are the standard comparisons — are not simply flattering; they are acknowledging that she operated at a level of competence that required the comparison.
Aurelian, who had reunified the western empire by 272 AD, turned east and destroyed Zenobia’s empire in a campaign of that year. The decisive engagement at Immae near Antioch demonstrated a tactical intelligence — luring the Palmyrene cavalry to pursue Roman forces until the horses were exhausted, then turning to defeat them — that reflects Aurelian’s considerable military abilities. Palmyra surrendered, Zenobia was captured during her flight toward Persia, and the city was initially treated with relative leniency. A subsequent revolt was punished with much greater severity; Aurelian destroyed much of the city and killed most of its population. The great commercial center that had defied Rome never recovered.
Zenobia’s fate after her capture is disputed. One tradition holds that she was brought to Rome for Aurelian’s triumph and then lived out her days in comfortable captivity at a villa near Tivoli. Another holds that she died on the journey to Rome, by starvation or by her own hand. The first account is more widely attested and perhaps more plausible given that executing a foreign queen at a triumph was not the standard Roman practice; a captive queen who had challenged the empire’s eastern position and survived to live in Italian retirement was a more nuanced demonstration of Roman magnanimity than a simple execution. Whether the magnanimity was real or constructed for political effect, the end of Zenobia’s political career was the end of Palmyra as a significant political entity.
The ruins that survived into the modern era — the colonnaded street, the Temple of Bel, the Arch of Triumph, the theater — were among the most impressive surviving examples of Roman provincial architecture in the Middle East. The deliberate destruction carried out by ISIS in 2015 and 2016, targeting specifically the most prominent monuments and the scholars who protected them, was understood by its perpetrators as an act against a particular vision of human civilization and its continuity. That the ruins of a city that had defied Rome in the third century AD should be the target of ideological destruction in the twenty-first is one of the more unexpected chapters in Palmyra’s long history of serving as a site where large forces contest what the world should look like.